GoAccess VS GoatCounter

Compare GoAccess vs GoatCounter and see what are their differences.

GoAccess

GoAccess is a real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser. (by allinurl)

GoatCounter

Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data. (by arp242)
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GoAccess GoatCounter
76 61
17,467 4,160
- 2.2%
9.2 8.2
13 days ago 1 day ago
C Go
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

GoAccess

Posts with mentions or reviews of GoAccess. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-24.
  • You don't need analytics on your blog
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023
    If one wants server-side metrics with a little more info than the author's "hacky little script", there's always goaccess [1], which functions in broadly the same way. I even use it with Firebase Hosting-hosted sites via [2] (which I wrote).

    [1] http://goaccess.io/

    [2] https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf

  • Using Analytics on My Website
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    > Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.

    GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

    Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.

    That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

    I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

    People have also said good things about Plausible Analytics as well: https://plausible.io/

  • How do {you} analyze apache log files?
    1 project | /r/PHP | 18 Nov 2023
    Maybe, if it's just local and need just information, maybe https://goaccess.io is an option.
  • Show HN: Why Google Analytics May Not Be the Best Option for Your Website (2023)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2023
    I run goaccess on a cron job and have paired it with a MaxMind GeoIP database so that you can see where people are coming from etc.

    https://goaccess.io/

  • Working on Ubuntu: File does not exist on the server, how to create it
    1 project | /r/Wordpress | 27 May 2023
    file on GitHub.
  • Display real time visitors statistics of a website
    1 project | /r/Wordpress | 22 May 2023
    There is small programm for linux https://goaccess.io/
  • Monitoring traefik access logs easily
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 8 May 2023
    I heard about https://goaccess.io/ (and even tested it) but first, nothing about tracing logs, and I think that the provided HTML dashboard isn't enough security-oriented for me but it's more about monitoring your customer volume... It does -partially- fit my case.
  • Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2023
    Loved AWStats! Still can be useful — but bots, client side caching, CDNs, and did I mention bots..? have made the data hard to rely on for much. A while ago I switched from AWStats to GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/) for this kind of thing. I prefer its interface, and it's way way faster to churn through big log files (C vs. Perl).
  • Show HN: Google Analytics alternative with the most generous free tier
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2023
    matomo and goatcounter are nice, but there are even solutions which don't need any extra CPU or any extra client request:

    • https://goaccess.io/

    • https://www.awstats.org/

    Both of them are free/open-source.

  • Setup GoAccess in Ubuntu/Linux with Docker and Real-Cad & access over domain/sub-domain
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Apr 2023
    GoAccess is a powerful web log analyzer that generates real-time web traffic statistics.

GoatCounter

Posts with mentions or reviews of GoatCounter. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-05.
  • Show HN: Shareable Analytics for public stats. Customize sections and themes
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    47 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
    GoatCounter — GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform available as a hosted service (free for non-commercial use) or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy-to-use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. The free tier is for non-commercial use and includes unlimited sites, six months of data retention, and 100k pageviews/month.
  • GoatCounter creator is hoping to raise at least €1k for basic living expense
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024
    > Not sure when GoatCounter started

    "Hello, world" - arp242 committed on May 28, 2019 - 66a4d7f9b7af8dccacaf3ad8a9fb57a9f9008030 - https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/commit/66a4d7f9b7af8dc...

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024)
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
    Location: Ireland (Galway)

    Remote: yes

    Willing to relocate: yes

    Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

    Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

    Email: [email protected]

    I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

    In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

    I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

  • Goatcounter: Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
  • Using Analytics on My Website
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.
  • Ask HN: Is Google Analytics that useful?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2023
    I'm self-hosting GoatCounter and using it across all my websites.

    Apart from controlling my data, I also have more accurate visitor statistics, as it doesn't get picked up by script blockers, unlike GA.

    https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter

    https://www.goatcounter.com

  • What has your personal website/blog done for you?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2023
    I first used basic google analytics but found it too invasive/heavy so I switched over to https://www.goatcounter.com/.

    For comments, most solutions were also too heavy, paid or had ads, but I finally found https://giscus.app/.

    So while I did add these 2 features, I'm happy with those variants that I managed to find.

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023
    Location: Ireland

    Remote: yes

    Willing to relocate: yes

    Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

    Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

    Email: [email protected]

    I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

    In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

    I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

  • Ask HN: Looking for Google Analytics alternative after v4
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GoAccess and GoatCounter you can also consider the following projects:

AWStats - AWStats Log Analyzer project (official sources)

Plausible Analytics - Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

Elasticsearch - Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

Fathom Analytics - Fathom Lite. Simple, privacy-focused website analytics. Built with Golang & Preact.

Matomo - Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!

Umami - Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

Open Web Analytics - Official repository for Open Web Analytics which is an open source alternative to commercial tools such as Google Analytics. Stay in control of the data you collect about the use of your website or app. Please consider sponsoring this project.

PostHog - 🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host.

nginx-proxy-manager-goaccess - NGINX Proxy Manager and Goaccess docker file

Ackee - Self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy.